June 1, 2016

That's "the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination."

Trump has capitalized on the visceral belief of many white voters that government-enforced diversity and other related regulations are designed “to bring Americans to submission” by silencing their opposition to immigration — legal and illegal — to judicial orders putting low-income housing in the suburbs, and to government-mandated school integration, to name just a few of their least favorite things.

I've got an idea that's just so fuckin' crazy it just might work: why don't these anthropologists of the Tribe of Trump actually sit down at a diner with some Trumpites & talk to them. It would save them the embarrassment of writing drivel like what Edsall just did. For example, the line that I've bolded above: where & when has Trump harped on those topics? Oh, but those are some topics that Edsall thinks those sort of populist troglodytes have raged over in the past, so it must be what their raging over now. Uhhhm, what?

The article uses a lot of jargon but says what everybody has been saying ever since Trump got traction.

Middle and working class whites are the losers in the current globalist political arrangement and are tired of being derided by self-righteous leftists who are the people actually benefiting the most from exploitation of poor brown and black people. So, when somebody is able to effectively advocate for their interests arrives they are willing to support him. Also, guys don't like being pushed around and PC is exactly that, about pushing people around.

After some number of decades, it appears, Republican politicians who extol the sacred mission of limiting government, but never seem to try very hard—or at any rate, very consequentially—to actually limit government, leave their supporters wondering whether they would be better advised to support less quixotic crusades. When even the low-hanging fruit, like defunding the National Endowment for the Arts, is higher than any Republican ladder, it becomes difficult to keep believing that GOP victories are a matter of any real urgency. This state of affairs leaves Republicans arguing that the strongest case for their party is the need to make it more difficult for Democrats to do their worst. “Join the team committed to losing slowly,” however, isn’t much of a recruiting pitch.

the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive [read "perceive" as "know to an ontological certainty"] that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination.

I haven't read it yet, and as a conservative, I have a lot of respect for Haidt, if he wrote this, as a social scientist, but this sounds like kind of an obtuse formulation for him, as if he is in the grips of TDS himself. I guess women are better because they are more accepting of the domination of the elites. Maybe that is how we are supposed to read it.

"redouble their efforts and do it even more" That looks like a great big redundancy to me, who edits this stuff?

the accusatory and vindictive approach of many social justice activists and diversity trainers may actually have increased the desire and willingness of some white men to say and do un-PC things.

Ummmm yeah. Haidt is always worth reading. He's a liberal, but I think he actually understands conservatives to some extent. He has been heavily attacked by liberals, however for pointing out that liberals generally cannot, for example, recapitulate a conservative argument in their own words, but instead "Reject first! Ask rhetorical questions later!" While conservatives in his experiments had little trouble understanding and explaining liberal arguments on their own terms. Read Shilo the commenter for a current example of this dynamic.

Psychological acceptance is "the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have the right or justification for stopping you. So you give up your efforts and do it less, just to show that you accept their domination. Women in particular are concerned to show that they accept domination."

Trump’s anger at being policed or fenced in apparently speaks to the resentment of many American men and their resistance to being instructed, particularly by a female candidate, on how they should think, speak or behave.

Yeah, that's it, we are more than happy to be told how to think and behave by a male candidate! Actually, a successful male candidate would instinctively understand that telling people how to think and behave is not their role. There is so much wrong in this sentence that I am not sure there are enough pixels on the internet to fully plumb the depths of its stupidity.

she has got nothing else going. Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she would get 5 percent of the vote.”

I would like to see him demonstrate that that is not true with some argument aside from "everybody knows it's not true."

She has yet to discover a compelling rebuttal to Trump on political correctness, and it will be difficult for her to placate opponents of immigration while holding her advantage with her base. Nonetheless, although her bite is not as lethal as Trump’s, she will soon have almost the entire Democratic Party in her corner, including a cadre of operatives whose specialty is drawing blood.

What the idiot wants to splain is why a pot of slow cooking Frogs all suddenly jump out of the hot water together before they die. What he does not have a clue to is what has made them all jump, so he proceeds to make up some abstract Big Words like they are reacting bugs and not men.

But the only words that splain this is the appearance of "a Real Leader that shows to his men the resolve to win and the palpable strength that wills to fight to the end and never abandons them in mid-fight for fear or for money."

Achilles: "...99% of psycological terminology is not based on science. I think they should stop pretending it is."

I agree that it is not scientific but in a deep sense it is (here, anyway) "true." As in, "how we actually do stuff."

In the case of this "reactance" thing, the jargon-free version is "Fuck you, you self-important asshole, I will see you and raise you."

Or to quote Travis Bickel, "You want a piece of me? Do you, punk?"

Guys get like that. Maybe older white guys get more like that, I don't know. But collectively they are putting a lot of energy behind the two guys (Trump and Sanders) who are prepared to say stuff remotely like that.

"Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination."

This is really good to know, since my 72 years of experience is quite the opposite. Men have always seemed to me far more willing to accept leadership. Men adjust to hierarchy better than women. Men hate to lose, but being competitive by nature most met lose quite often. It's part of being competitive. Men also tend to lose with more grace than women do.

Most alpha men, except super alphas who border on sociopathic, have to learn how to deal with the power of others. Since there is so much that is powerful in the world, men learn to pick their spots. The most successful are those who pick them particularly well.

Bollocks. Political correctness is a phantasm. Refusing to bow to it is an indication of a healthy psyche. For a man or a woman. What spluttering nonsense the Left vomits and how laughable that they expect people in the real world to live by it.

"the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination."

Yeah, social breakdown and economic insecurity probably have nothing to do with it. I'm sure it's all just men's egos. By far the best thing about Trump's candidacy is the way it makes PC elite-minded people squirm. The media having a collective sob fest over Trump's recent presser was delicious.

I'm driven to utter loathing for the things written by educated folks about this election. Absolutely the lowest minds, couched in the finest plumage.

Three strategies:

1. bring the brightest people in the world here to work in person with other bright people. can't tell who those are? IQ test and/or wealth requirement. we do this to a limited extent. hate them if you like, but our tech and banking and media elites are at least beating the competition (for now) and it's good they're here

2. be it ever so humble, there's no culture like our own. keep Stranger Danger culture out of the US. we don't need 'em. rape culture? doesn't exist here *at all* but it sure does where the 'refugees' come from. other than the privileged #1 immigration we ought to severely clamp down (like australia, singapore and a few other winners)

3. minimize harm from government and academy do-gooder wannabes. these are some seriously twisted people when you think about their absolute failure to first advance a case that the interventions they politic for are in fact good. ideally they can be reformed toward the project of actually running experiments and making correct predictions (non-fraudulently would be nice, but I'll take even believable fraud as an improvement)

when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination.

This is wrong. The increased (counter) efforts are not "just to show that you don't accept". It's what is required in the real world in order to maintain, at least, the status quo. Anything less would constitute losing ground.

The phraseology in the original quote makes the "redoubling" seem like the actions of a petulant child. No doubt that was the author's intent.

"There are three things, young gentlemen, which you are constantly to bear in mind. Firstly, you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own respecting their propriety. Secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and thirdly, you must hate a Frenchman, as you do the devil." Admiral Lord Nelson

The idea of opposing with redoubled determination any attempted domination is one cherished by empires, nations, kings, queens, lords, ladies, common folk and most especially small despots, i.e., SJWs, who perceive attempted domination where none is contemplated, let alone extant.